Age Segregation and the Need for Intergenerational Solidarity: A Call for Humanistic Psychology

This is a “reaction paper” to the seminal paper by Hagestad and Uhlenberg on the impact of age segregation on ageism. Drawing primarily on research in the United States and the Netherlands, they highlighted institutional, spatial, and cultural dimensions of age segregation throughout the individual’s life span. My “reaction paper” identifies how the three major founders of humanistic psychology—Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Rollo May—presciently addressed this topic from the life-affirming perspective of what I prefer to call intergenerational solidarity. Drawing on personal and clinical experience, each felt it essential that age segregation be decisively reversed in American society.